Social Question

Do you think the United States needs to make improvements to the Power Grid?

I have felt we did since the 2001 Black Out in the North East. I have wondered if China caused the 2001 Black Out? Simply because they wanted to prove they could?
I have experienced Black Outs five times in the past ten years.
I had no power from last Saturday afternoon until Tuesday evening.
I am starting to wonder if, this is what the future America will be like?

@janbb
This was a very disconcerting week for me.
We had a bad storm. It was cold and we had no heat or lights from Saturday afternoon until Tuesday evening.
I had to cook in the dark.
My Son is Autistic and he did not really understand.
I think many Americans know we are right. Why isn’t Congress working on it? I guess giving themselves raises comes first; or maybe bailing out some big corporation.

I like the idea of having the power sources right at our homes and on top of our buildings like wind and solar. As long as we are dependent on the grid, you will be dependent, shelling out money every month to a company or government. Just my pie in the sky fantasy. Carry on.

Of course. It’s not a question of “do we need to?”, but “how quickly can we?” (and “how do we budget for it honestly?”)

The fact is that if you have infrastructure, whether roads & bridges, rail systems, airports, power plants and distribution systems, whatever, you need to always consider maintenance, expansion and replacement. Always.

To the extent that these types of decisions are left up to politicians, however, they are routinely downplayed, ignored and underfunded as much as possible. (Same thing with siting and permitting new plants, including refineries.) The problem is that they aren’t sexy: grandstanding for “health care for all Americans” is popular—everyone wants “the government” to take care of them “for free”. No one wants to live near an electrical transmission line, or have a bridge maintenance program disrupt their daily commute. So those things are routinely put off, at least until the bridge drops into the river one afternoon, or the power fails on a hot day in the summer.

The main improvement I think we need is smart meters. This is the 21st century, our power lines still work essentially the same they do when the grid was first introduced (if that’s even the proper word to use there.) For smarter energy use, we need meters that will tell us how much energy we’re using, how to save it, and communicate with our appliances. These are already in development but it will take quite a bit to implement them.

@philosopher – the headline to that article reads “Did Hackers Cause the 2003 Northeast Blackout? Umm, No” – and you’re using it as a reference to imply that the Chinese might have caused the blackout? Did you read the article?

An excerpt: “The detailed 228-page final NERC report found a complex confluence of events responsible, but not a single hacker. It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy’s failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.”